Part 1: Corpus Linguistics

What is corpus linguistics?

Corpus linguistics is a field which focuses
upon a set of procedures, or methods, for studying language. We can take a corpus-based
approach to many areas of linguistics.
Importantly, the development of corpus linguistics has also spawned new theories of language – theories which
draw their inspiration from attested language use and the findings drawn from it.

But corpus linguistics is not a monolithic, consensually agreed set of methods and procedures. It is in fact a
heterogeneous field – although there are some basic generalisations that we can make.

A concordance in the AntConc tool

The main features of corpus linguistics

Research in corpus linguistics deals with some set of machine-readable texts which is deemed an appropriate basis
on which to study a particular research questions. The set of texts or corpus
is usually of a size which defies analysis by hand and eye alone within any reasonable timeframe. For this reason,
corpora are invariably exploited using software search tools.
Concordancers allow users to look at words in context. Other tools allow the production of frequency data,
for example a word frequency list, which lists all words appearing in a corpus and specifies how many times each
one occurs in that corpus. Concordances and frequency data exemplify respectively the two forms of analysis,
namely qualitative and quantitative, that are equally important to corpus linguistics.

Different types of corpus study

The following features effectively distinguish different types of studies in corpus linguistics: